Home. Love. Books.: Amy Joy Lutchen Guest Post

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Amy Joy Lutchen Guest Post

What it means to me to be an author (besides the obvious parenthood of a block of written words):

For me, it started with one meaning: control. You see, my story, Renhala, started as a single piece of paper littered with a hodgepodge of written fears and tragic events from my life, with one very tragic event taking me the longest to write down, the very one I wrote the smallest: the assault. These very small words, which I thought had the biggest impact on who I was at that time, were sitting there on the page, laughing at me, despite their puny size. I stared, and stared at those words, often fighting with myself to roll the paper up and toss it away, but I knew it really wouldn’t be gone. Those words were going to haunt me forever, as well as the humiliation associated with them—the humiliation inflicted by the hands of a total stranger on a very dark day of my life.

But one day, out of the blue and in a moment of surprising triumph, I gathered my strength and flipped that stupid piece of paper over and began writing more words, different words. These words began as a small story about a young woman who was assaulted who loses her mother—her only support— to disease, which then morphed into another story of a young woman who suffered the same fate, but befriended some new, supportive friends. As the magic began flowing freely from my fingertips, this same young woman then mastered a new weapon and her destiny was changed forever. I finally felt better about myself—felt better about life—for I was shaping future events. I wrangled those ugly words and fought them down hard, wrestling and dodging blows, until I took CONTROL. I took control, and took those words and kneaded them, molding them into exactly what what I needed, into something inspiring and uplifting: the mystical land known as Renhala.

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I know, that no matter who you are and where you’ve come from, you’ve had some kind of tragic event, or maybe multiple moments of tragedy, muddy your life. Perhaps it was the death of a loved one, or sickness, or bullying, or an assault. Whatever it was, or even is, just know that you can gain the advantage. You can wash yourself of the bad. Write the words down. Write those words down as a poem, short story, epic novel, rap song, whatever, but just write them down. This is how you’ll take the first step in control. This will be your literary therapeutic jam session. This is how you’ll change the future.

Change your life by changing the words…